tance of history as a study is
found in its philosophy.

As far down as the eighteenth century, almost everything in history
partakes of the nature of chronicle. In that century, in obedience to the
law of human progress, there sprang up in England and on the Continent the
men who first made chronicle material for philosophy, and used philosophy
to teach by example what to imitate and what to shun.

What were the circumstances which led, in the eighteenth century, to the
simultaneous appearance of Hume, Gibbon, and Robertson, as the originators
of a new school of history? Some of them have been already mentioned in
treating of the antiquarian age. We have endeavored to show how the
English literati--novelists, essayists, and poets--have been in part
unconscious historians. It will also appear that the professed historians
themselves have been, in a great measure, the creatures of English
history. The _fifteenth_ century was the period when the revival of
letters took place, and a great spur was given to mental activity; but the
world, like a child, was again learning rudiments, and finding out what it
was, and what it possessed at that present time: it received the new
classical culture presented to it at the fall of the lower empire, and was
content to learn the existing, without endeavoring to create the new, or
even to recompose the scattered fragments of the past. The _eighteenth_
century saw a new revival: the world had become a man; great progress was
reported in arts, in inventions, and in discoveries; science began to
labor at the arduous but important task of classification; new theories of
government and laws were propounded; the past was consulted that its
experience might be applied; the partisan chronicles needed to be united
and compared that truth might be elicited; the philosophic historian was
required, and the people were ready to learn, and to criticize, what he
produced.

I have ventured to call this the Sceptical Age. It had other
characteristics: this was one. We use the word sceptical in its
etymological sense: it was an age of inquiry, of doubt to be resolved.
Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, D'Alembert, and Diderot had founded a new
school of universal inquiry, and from their bold investigations and
startling theories sprang the society of the _illuminati_, and the race of
thinkers. They went too far: they stabbed the truth as it lay in the grasp
of error. From thinkers they became free-thinke